A late-night commuter witnesses a chilling event outside the window of their subway car, and becomes obsessed with solving the mystery which surrounds it. 

 

Credits:

Written, Narrated, and Produced by Doryen Chin

Sensitivity Reader: Auden Granger

 

Transcript and Content Warnings under the cut:

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Note: The audio you will hear is slightly altered from the text below, but the transcript is accurate for most purposes.

[content warning: suicide mentioned, workplace sexual harassment]

 

METRO

by Doryen Chin

My name is Tracy Urnwight. It's been almost a year since the last time I took the train. I'm moving upstate next week, because even the low-pitched rumble of the subway beneath the street makes me break into a cold sweat.

It was the last week of October, and I was on my way home after working my second double in a row at a lounge in Soho and I was scheduled to open the next day. I needed the money.

I think it must've been almost three in the morning. At that hour, there are fewer lines open. I had to go half an hour out of my way just to get home, but it was either that or walk all the way to the nearest direct route. At the time, walking those dim streets alone just wasn't worth the trouble.

So there I was, sitting by myself in the last car on the train, my head against the window. My phone was dead, so I was forced to read all the cheesy ads plastered all over the car just to keep myself awake long enough not to miss my stop.

Near the end of my commute, there's a long stretch of tracks that run above ground. As the train emerged from the tunnel, I glanced out the window to look at the skyline that was visible beyond an old warehouse district. Neon skyscrapers flashed between the rows and rows of passing warehouses and old mills.

It was right about then that I caught a glimpse of something that made me sit up in my seat. You know that thing where the human eye finds faces in everyday objects? Para... Para-doll... whatever. Apparently it works that way for things that look like human bodies too. There's nothing quite like the shock of seeing a person where you don't expect there to be one. You can imagine then how it felt, as my train passed the last of the warehouses and I saw there, on the roof of the warehouse at the very end of the row, standing right on the ledge -- easily a hundred feet off the ground -- was a person.

I stared as the train pulled away, and just before the warehouses winked out of sight, my stomach lurched as I saw them jump.

Immediately I stood and craned my neck to get a better look. Unable to see anything, I ran to the back of the car and crammed my face against the window, my hands cupped around my eyes against the lights, but I saw only darkness, and the pale orange glow of the city against the sky.

My phone still dead as it was an hour before, I ran ahead to the next few cars and found, that, the only other people on the train this far down the line were, an old Vietnamese couple and a junkie passed out on the bench seats.

Funny how there's always a guard nearby whenever you lose your pass, but never one when you need any help. I don't think I got any sleep that night.

I spent the next day with one eye glued to the news. Checking Twitter, local stations, anything I could think of. By the end of my shift, I had mostly convinced myself that I must have imagined the whole thing. I hadn't exactly been getting any actual real sleep lately, and it was entirely possible that I didn't see anything at all.

But that night, as my train once again emerged from the tunnel, I held on white-knuckled to the seats in front of me as I found myself staring out at those old decrepit warehouses. I expected to see them dark and abandoned, like they always were. Of course they would be. They had to be.

I should have been dead tired, but instead I found myself wide, painfully awake. Unlike when you're dreaming, when the world is slightly dulled, I could feel the absolute reality of the world around me